The World Wide Web has expanded to provide numerous web services to consumers. The web services may be provided by a web application which uses multiple services and applications to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provide the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Monitoring a web application helps to provide insight regarding bottle necks in communication, communication failures and other information regarding performance of the services that provide the web application. Most application monitoring tools provide a standard report regarding application performance. Though the typical report may be helpful for most users, it may not provide the particular information that an administrator wants to know.
In particular, application performance management (APM) systems typically only monitor the performance of an application. The APM systems usually do not provide performance details of a particular network over which an application executes. If network information is provided, it is typically only the time that the transaction spends on the network—there is no context or other data regarding the network. What is needed is an APM system that provides application-specific network performance details.